In hitching their fortunes to the Pentagon's missile shield programme, the Poles and Czechs are taking out an insurance policy against Russia.

Within about five years the US hopes to have deployed 10 interceptor missiles at a huge silo, probably in north-eastern Poland, to be fired into space to take out rogue rockets heading towards America from, say, Iran, with radar facilities for the project in the neighbouring Czech Republic. That is the plan, although there are strong reservations over whether "Son of Star Wars" will ever fly.

For the Poles and the Czechs, whether the missile shield works is beside the point. What counts in Warsaw and Prague is getting US bases on their territory. That makes them feel safe.

The two countries, Donald Rumsfeld's archetypal "new Europeans", have a history of being preyed on by mightier neighbours, basically Russia and Germany, and betrayed by western Europeans. They have been warning for years that Russia will return as a world power and not necessarily as a benign and allied "democracy". They feel vindicated by developments under Vladimir Putin.

When the cold war ended with the central Europeans kicking out the Russians, the former Warsaw Pact countries were left in a security vacuum. Russia wanted to create a cordon sanitaire in Europe between itself and the EU and Nato. For the central Europeans, western integration became a national imperative to keep Russia at bay.

The former Soviet satellites were brought into Nato in the 1990s and the EU in 2004. But while happy to be members, the Poles and the Czechs are the biggest Eurosceptics of the 10 countries that joined in 2004. They are suspicious of the Germans and patronised by the French. They share the British preferences for the EU, for strong transatlantic ties, minimal political union and no fiscal harmonisation.

They would never turn to Germany or France for security. They see America as indispensable, their security guarantor of last resort. The bases put the Americans in Poland and the Czech Republic as never before. Public opinion is hostile or wary. A referendum on whether to take part would probably be unwinnable in either country. Which is why no referendums will be held.

The Czech opposition leader, Jiri Paroubek of the centre-left Social Democrats, is backing away from referendum calls after being leaned on, say sources, by the Americans in Prague.

In Poland, the pro-American defence minister, Radek Sikorski, has just resigned but his departure is unlikely to jeopardise Poland's participation in the missile shield.